For me, the major advantage of base.pm was that it originally would catch typos for you. Since use base qw( Food::Barf ); would die if there was no Food/Barf.pm to load (because the module's name is actually Foo::Bar).

But Schwern's careless featuritis broke that most important feature and broke it so badly that Schwern basically abandoned the module as unfixable when he finally noticed his mistake.

I think the breakage is fairly easy to fix so I'm quite disappointed that Schwern not only broke a nice module but also chose to not fix it. Not that I'd go back to using the module any time soon after it was fixed, since there would still be too many broken versions of it in circulation.

Luckily this is no big loss for me since it only saves one line of typing, the typos can still be caught by basic unit testing, and I hardly ever use inheritance in Perl anyway.

Update: I have a distinct memory of looking at the source code to base.pm when I first started using it and finding something extremely simple. Looking around now I suspect that this is a false memory and base.pm may have been broken in some of these ways all along. Mea culpa. It wouldn't be the first time the "obvious design requirement" (to me) was only in my head.